Back Rowe Reviews
Real Time Movie Reviews from the Back Row of a Theater

The Guardian (PG-13)

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Directed by: Andrew Davis
Starring: Kevin Costner
September 2006

“Standard Ending Nearly Sinks Heartfelt Story”


“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” Dickens’ oft-quoted line from his classic A Tale of Two Cities is an excellent description of the latest Kevin Costner vehicle entitled The Guardian. An obvious promotional piece for the Coast Guard—its riff on Top GunThe Guardian boasts several meaningful scenes, but also contains some elements that are in desperate need of being rescued.

Ben Randall (Costner), a legendary Coast Guard rescue swimmer, was recently traumatized when a rescue mission ended in tragedy, leaving him the only survivor. The mental toll of the ill-fated rescue attempt, compounded with Ben’s recent separation from wife Helen (Sela Ward), forces Capt. Hadley (Clancy Brown) to take Ben off of active duty; Ben is transferred from Barksdale AFB in Kodiak, AK to the Coast Guard training facility in Louisiana. Inspecting the new crop of trainees, Ben sees potential in cocky upstart, Jake Fischer (Ashton Kutcher); a decorated college swimmer, Jake has his sights set on toppling all of Ben’s swimming records. However, as Ben is quick to remind the trainees, there’s more to saving lives than just swimming. Scrapping the traditional PT regimen, Ben initiates a series of unorthodox training sessions; including a one hour endurance test where touching the bottom or sides of the pool means instant disqualification from the program, a hypothermia exercise in an ice-filled pool and a teamwork/breathing exercise where two swimmers must move a brick from one side of the pool to the other, but the swimmers can only come up for air one at a time. Ben’s hard-nosed approach immediately alienates Skinner (Neal McDonough) and makes Capt. Frank Larson (John Heard) wonder if Ben’s cut out to be a drill instructor. These training sequences are the movie’s double-edged sword—some viewers will enjoy the process involved in molding trainees, while others will grow frustrated by the lack of progression and check out somewhere in the middle of the movie.

The film’s structure is basic enough; the beginning and end feature rescue missions, while the middle focuses on academy training. Besides being predictable at every turn,
The Guardian defaults to the standard disaster movie ending where the older man cuts himself free from a safety cord so that the younger man can continue on and, presumably, live a long and fruitful life. We’ve seen this exact ending in Backdraft and Vertical Limit, with Armageddon and Poseidon bearing a close enough resemblance to make it worth mentioning here. This climax must be effective—even though it shamelessly manipulates the audience’s emotions—otherwise it wouldn’t be used with such frequency. But please, Hollywood movers and shakers, no more resolutions of this kind! Next time, maybe the writers can do something different and sacrifice the younger man—it might be politically incorrect, but at least it would contain a modicum of reality and treat the audience to something original.

That is not to say that the movie doesn’t have any touching moments: Ben’s apparent reconciliation with his wife makes his tragic demise all the more painful. Also, when Ben and Jake learn that they both have emotional hang-ups over being the sole survivor of an accident, a connection is made and a friendship begins to form. These episodes, where genuine emotions begin rising to the surface, are few and far between in a movie far more concerned with magnifying the courageous sacrifice of Coast Guard swimmers, as honorable as that is, than with chiseling out three-dimensional characters or crafting dialogue written above a high school level.

As for the acting, Costner is a tad less wooden here than usual, and Kutcher shows early signs of being a decent dramatic actor. What anchors the movie is its excellent supporting cast; especially Heard, McDonough, Ward, Brown and Melissa Sagemiller as Jake’s girlfriend, Emily.

Though some of the sequences involving angry, undulating waves made me seasick, like the ones in
The Perfect Storm, director Andrew Davis (The Fugitive) does a good job of making the action seem realistic. Too bad the script didn’t follow suit.

Rating: 2 1/2